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Anyone actually read Salmon Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" all the way through?

I ground my way through the first 150 pages before realising it wasn't going to get any better.

Honestly, it put me right off Salmon, more so even than Nikki!!

The Highway Code.
WTF was that all about??!!

Ah, don't say that! I have to read that as part of a challenge I'm doing, and I won't be allowed to skip it. In what way is it bad?

Keeping on the straight and narrow. And if you must go around the bend. Take it slowly.

Oh my, now you're asking, it's about 10 years on since I (didn't) read it.

From what I can remember, the characters were boring, the narrative was boring, the themes were boring, and the writing affected... and boring!!!

Other than that, what an ace read!


(plus all the mucus symbolism was revolting)

I don't want to ruin it for anyone giving away the ending but....

I felt the same about Anthills of the Savannah, to this day I don't know why it's a Penguin Classic!

Oh, I've just remembered an even more annoyingly tedious book, even longer than "Midnight's Children". Although I didn't have the sense to stop reading it.

"Middlemarch" by George Elliot.

So named because if you start reading it in October, it will be the middle of March before you wearily finish it.

800 pages of stupefying boredom!! Boring, self-absorbed people going about their boring, self-aborbed life doing boring, pointless things in a meanigless void.

And I get enough of that watching Big Brother!

@ CC

Inspired.

I haven't read that, hell, I haven't even heard of the book! But I have certainly shared that experience (with many different books).

We could start another thread, "Penguin Classics that should never have been!"

I will join in the defence of Sunset Song. When we first started reading it in class, I admit I didn't particularly like it. However, by the end I was hooked - it even made me cry!

As for a book I hated, well I'm one of those strange people who never really enjoyed Lord of the Flies. Maybe I need to re-read it, but I just didn't enjoy it. The Red Pony By John Steinbeck was another one I wasn't fond of either.

Well, feel free to tell me why I'm wrong!

Alan how could you? I lurve Middlemarch.

I felt as suffocated reading it as Dorothea did in her life.

And the doctor? Do them all a favour and prescribe the entire parish some arsenic.

C'mon now, Ellie, tell me why I am such an imbecile ("don't call him an imbecile, it's the worst thing you can call anybody!!") for not 'getting' Middlemarch.

Convince me...

see if I don't like a book I just stop reading it. Why labour through 800 pages of shite alan? Why not just put the bugger down and pick up a better one

Because I had to write an essay on it, silly.

I am not that daft.